The hawkish GOP senators have launched a pre-emptive strike against Susan Rice, the U.N. ambassador, who is a contender to replace Secretary of State Hillary Clinton once Clinton quits her job as the nation's top diplomat.

With President Obama winding down the Afghanistan war over their protests, McCain, R-Ariz., and Graham, R-S.C., have now opened a domestic front against the president's foreign policy by going after Rice. They couch their opposition to her in an overblown objection to Rice's inaccurate characterization of the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, as a spontaneous action and not the terrorism intelligence reports confirmed.

"I am dead-set on making sure that we don't promote anybody who was an essential player in the Benghazi debacle," Graham said. McCain was even more bombastic during an appearance on Fox News. "I will do everything in my power to block her from being the United States secretary of State," he said.

The talking points the Obama administration gave Rice in advance of her appearances on several Sunday morning TV talk shows did not brand the Benghazi action, which took the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, a terrorist attack. So, McCain and Graham say Rice is not fit to be secretary of State because she repeated what she was told to say.

That's it. That is the long and short of what McCain and Graham have said publicly about their opposition to Rice becoming secretary of State. And it is nonsense.

McCain was not always so emphatic about what should disqualify a presidential nominee from gaining Senate confirmation. In 2005, when President Bush nominated John Bolton to be his ambassador to the United Nations, McCain was a high profile defender of the then senior State Department official. Bolton's opponents said he was unfit for the job because, among other things, he allegedly tried to get a State Department analyst to change an intelligence finding to support his own world view.

"We need an ambassador who has the trust of the president and the secretary of State," McCain said on Senate floor in defense of Bolton. Then he went on to say "elections have consequences, and one consequence of President Bush's re-election is that he has the right to appoint officials of his choice." A president, McCain said, "has a right to put into place the team that he believes will serve him best."

But now, seven years later -- with the Democrat who dealt him a landslide defeat in 2008 still in the White House -- McCain ignores those words and threatens to use the Senate's arcane procedural rules to stop that body from voting on Rice, should Obama nominate her for the top State Department job. In this effort, Graham is his wingman.

But in going after Obama in this way, they run the risk of opening an even wider gap between the Republican Party and women, 55% of whom voted for Obama in his lopsided victory this year over GOP candidate Mitt Romney. A dozen female members of the House of Representatives drove home that point when they held a news conference to accuse McCain and Graham of being sexist and racist in their attack on Rice, who is black.

While the two Republican senators might prevail in keeping Rice from becoming secretary of State -- either by forestalling her nomination or blocking a Senate confirmation vote -- their opposition to her almost certainly will be seen by many others as proof of a GOP war on women.

And that will cost Republicans dearly at the polls.

DeWayne Wickham writes on Tuesdays for USA TODAY.

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